■ Society
Town's couples stay together
The tiny, serene Hakka rural township of Hengshan in Hsinchu County seems to have Cupid's blessing, as 67 couples living there have celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary, photographer Chen Yu-shu (陳玉書) said yesterday. Compared with Hsinchu City, where there are only 20-odd couples out of a population of 380,000 who have been married for over 60 years, Hengshan boasts 67 such couples out of a population of 14,000, Chen said. Chen has spent six months in rural areas around Hsinchu as an artist-in-residence. The Hakka seniors are intriguing and they make superb models, Chen said. Chen has been photographing around the rural areas for the Hsinchu Railway Art Village and he found the Hengshan seniors the most adorable, particularly with vintage railway systems as backgrounds.
■ Travel
Plane's door torn off at CKS
The side door of a United Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft was torn off yesterday when it suddenly moved away from a passenger gantry at Taiwan's CKS International Airport, officials said. None of the 143 passengers and 11 crew on the plane that was bound for Nagoya, Japan, were injured. "It was probably a communication problem," an airport official said. An inquiry was launched by the Aviation Safety Council into the cause of the incident, the second one in less than a week. Last Thursday a piece of wing came loose from a Fokker passenger plane flying on a domestic route, breaking two of its windows.
■ Activism
Group denies allegations
An official of the government-funded Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) denied over the weekend a report that the foundation has financed a journal launched by Chinese democracy activists overseas in exchange for their support for Taiwan independence. According to the report published by a Beijing-based newspaper on Friday, the Beijing Spring monthly receives an annual US$50,000 subsidy from the foundation under a contract established between the two sides. The report claimed that under this arrangement, members of the journal's editorial committee are assigned by the National Security Bureau, and any personnel adjustments require the bureau's approval. Chou Yi-cheng (周奕成), an official with the TFD, dismissed the report. Chou said that the foundation did subsidize Beijing Spring last year, but that it has not done so this year.
■ Food Safety
Firms recall rice dumplings
The food producer Hsin Tung Yang is among four companies that has been required to withdraw rice dumplings intended for the Dragon Boat Festival from stores after a random sampling showed that its BBQ red yeast rice dumplings contained excessive quantities of the preservative benzoic acid. A total of 84 samples were taken by the Taipei City Government's Department of Health on May 17, with four containing excessive quantities of preservative and eight failing to meet hygiene standards. If the excess quantities of preservative are found to be due to actions of the manufacturer, a fine of between NT$30,000 and NT$150,000 may be levied. Rice dumplings from other up-market companies such as the Kee-Wah Bakery and the hypermarket Geant were found to have excessive quantities of bacillus coli, and have also been recalled.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching